Battery of Chat, Search & Wesnothd Improvements

[DarkDespair5]

• Advanced search to locate games by characteristics: (Note: Integer fields should have a dropdown in case a comparison is required, i.e. # players > 1)
  
  • Substring of the name of a game
  • Number of players/ Teams
  • Open/Observable/Closed Status
  • %XP/ Gold Per Village/Time of Day
  • Era
  • Map
  • Game Creator
  • Friend Status
  • Possibly Offensive (see below)
• An "Offensive" checkbox option for game creators (showing on the game list of course) that would allow for seamless and unobstructed gameplay without moderator intervention for people who know what they're getting into. It's quite infuriating to have to warn users beforehand. It would help focus developers' efforts on more serious violations that actually disrupt gameplay and allow people who want to curse at the Wesnoth RNG to do so
• The ability to set your in-game nick to something different than your login & chat username.
• Ability to use moderation tools on server launched by wesnothd through the Wesnoth moderation GUI.
• Hosted Game crash fault tolerance. Wesnoth currently reports that you are already logged in if Wesnoth crashes and you try to log back in to your Hosted Game. The ghost user remains until you forcibly kill the wesnothd process.
• Increase the character limit of messages when sending a whisper. Indeed, if you overfill the message character field in the whisper dialog, Wesnoth multiplayer will crash with an overflow and return you to the main menu.
• Text formatting for chat and whispers, with appropriate options to disable it if desired.
• The game host's Wesnoth should save the game state every so often so that people who want to join immediately and set the fast replays option do not have to wait over 10 minutes on long games to see some action.
• Locally-hosted attack RNG makes it trivially easy to cheat on Wesnoth by hooking an application that sets the random generator's output to true. (It causes both attacker and defender to always hit, on your turn only) It creates no Out-Of-Sync error unlike other forms of cheating such as unit replacement or movehacks. This could be solved by polling another Wesnoth client to generate random numbers for you and comparing outcomes. Cheat Engine's Unrandomizer feature will do just this.

[runearun]

• Advanced search to locate games by characteristics: (Note: Integer fields should have a dropdown in case a comparison is required, i.e. # players > 1)
  
  • Substring of the name of a game
  • Number of players/ Teams
  • Open/Observable/Closed Status
  • %XP/ Gold Per Village/Time of Day
  • Era
  • Map
  • Game Creator
  • Friend Status
  • Possibly Offensive (see below)
• An "Offensive" checkbox option for game creators (showing on the game list of course) that would allow for seamless and unobstructed gameplay without moderator intervention for people who know what they're getting into. It's quite infuriating to have to warn users beforehand. It would help focus developers' efforts on more serious violations that actually disrupt gameplay and allow people who want to curse at the Wesnoth RNG to do so
• The ability to set your in-game nick to something different than your login & chat username.
• Ability to use moderation tools on server launched by wesnothd through the Wesnoth moderation GUI.
• Hosted Game crash fault tolerance. Wesnoth currently reports that you are already logged in if Wesnoth crashes and you try to log back in to your Hosted Game. The ghost user remains until you forcibly kill the wesnothd process.
• Increase the character limit of messages when sending a whisper. Indeed, if you overfill the message character field in the whisper dialog, Wesnoth multiplayer will crash with an overflow and return you to the main menu.
• Text formatting for chat and whispers, with appropriate options to disable it if desired.
• The game host's Wesnoth should save the game state every so often so that people who want to join immediately and set the fast replays option do not have to wait over 10 minutes on long games to see some action.
• Locally-hosted attack RNG makes it trivially easy to cheat on Wesnoth by hooking an application that sets the random generator's output to true. (It causes both attacker and defender to always hit, on your turn only) It creates no Out-Of-Sync error unlike other forms of cheating such as unit replacement or movehacks. This could be solved by polling another Wesnoth client to generate random numbers for you and comparing outcomes. Cheat Engine's Unrandomizer feature will do just this.

Great idea! Implementing these features would significantly reduce server lag time, thereby reducing the time people need to wait to play a game. This makes it a better experience for everyone. It would make it easier to look for games instead of scrolling down 3 pages to find something you need. This would simplify the interface and would help greatly on hosted networked games as well. The only thing I worry about is that increasing the character limit on messages could open the door for even more annoying spam than currently occurs on the server. Text formatting could also open the door to new security exploits.

Overall, I hope these ideas are approved.

[Baufo]

• Advanced search to locate games by characteristics: (Note: Integer fields should have a dropdown in case a comparison is required, i.e. # players > 1)
  
  • Substring of the name of a game
  • Number of players/ Teams
  • Open/Observable/Closed Status
  • %XP/ Gold Per Village/Time of Day
  • Era
  • Map
  • Game Creator
  • Friend Status
  • Possibly Offensive (see below)
• An "Offensive" checkbox option for game creators (showing on the game list of course) that would allow for seamless and unobstructed gameplay without moderator intervention for people who know what they're getting into. It's quite infuriating to have to warn users beforehand. It would help focus developers' efforts on more serious violations that actually disrupt gameplay and allow people who want to curse at the Wesnoth RNG to do so
• The ability to set your in-game nick to something different than your login & chat username.
• Ability to use moderation tools on server launched by wesnothd through the Wesnoth moderation GUI.
• Hosted Game crash fault tolerance. Wesnoth currently reports that you are already logged in if Wesnoth crashes and you try to log back in to your Hosted Game. The ghost user remains until you forcibly kill the wesnothd process.
• Increase the character limit of messages when sending a whisper. Indeed, if you overfill the message character field in the whisper dialog, Wesnoth multiplayer will crash with an overflow and return you to the main menu.
• Text formatting for chat and whispers, with appropriate options to disable it if desired.
• The game host's Wesnoth should save the game state every so often so that people who want to join immediately and set the fast replays option do not have to wait over 10 minutes on long games to see some action.
• Locally-hosted attack RNG makes it trivially easy to cheat on Wesnoth by hooking an application that sets the random generator's output to true. (It causes both attacker and defender to always hit, on your turn only) It creates no Out-Of-Sync error unlike other forms of cheating such as unit replacement or movehacks. This could be solved by polling another Wesnoth client to generate random numbers for you and comparing outcomes. Cheat Engine's Unrandomizer feature will do just this.

1) I basically did this in trunk, see http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=24577
2) Meh. We basically already have that, see http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/MP_CodeOfConduct#Exception
3) No. What would be the point of registered nicks then in the first place?
4) What?
5) As far as I know ghosts should be killed by the server automatically. Anyways, if you run your own server you can just kick ghosts and on the official server ghosts will be automatically kicked if you log in with a registered nick.
6) Hmm. I suppose that is an issue with the GUI code.
7) No.
There is a 'skip replay' checkbox so you don't have to wait ten minutes.

[DarkDespair5]

2) Meh. We basically already have that, see http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/MP_CodeOfConduct#Exception

What if you want people to be able to observe?

3) No. What would be the point of registered nicks then in the first place?

What if your nick is "offensive"?

4) What?

It won't let me use the kick/ban things from the GUI.

5) As far as I know ghosts should be killed by the server automatically. Anyways, if you run your own server you can just kick ghosts and on the official server ghosts will be automatically kicked if you log in with a registered nick.

It doesn't, and when I run my own server I can't kick if this happens because the admin is already there.

There is a 'skip replay' checkbox so you don't have to wait ten minutes.

Thanks

[Turuk]

What if your nick is "offensive"?

If a user has a registered nickname that is offensive then it can just be changed.

It won't let me use the kick/ban things from the GUI.

That interface, as it notes by saying "Moderating", is for server admins to be able to kick/ban players from the server, which is why you are not allowed to use it.

It doesn't, and when I run my own server I can't kick if this happens because the admin is already there.

I don't know why it would not work for you in this case, but it does currently work, as Baufo stated, that if a user has to log into the official server again then the ghost is kicked.

[DarkDespair5]

I meant moderating my own Hosted Network game with the GUI....

I said "my own server" i.e. hosted game. I didn't mean the official server. The system doesn't terminate ghosts when I run a hosted network game. Terminating 5+ ghosts is a royal pain.

One of the reasons I suggested the ability to change in-game names while having a single account login name is so that if the 'Offensive' box feature is implemented people will be able to play whatever games they wish in peace with as many observers as they want. Many games segregate "Username" from "Nickname" and this is what I was talking about.

[Turuk]

As far as I know ghosts should be killed by the server automatically. Anyways, if you run your own server you can just kick ghosts and on the official server ghosts will be automatically kicked if you log in with a registered nick.

It doesn't, and when I run my own server I can't kick if this happens because the admin is already there.

My mistake then, as it seems above that the "it doesn't" is in response to what Baufo said about the official server and then the rest of your response refers to what he said about running your own server.

[DarkDespair5]

My mistake then, as it seems above that the "it doesn't" is in response to what Baufo said about the official server and then the rest of your response refers to what he said about running your own server.

Sorry about that, it seems my post got a bit unorganized.

[Baufo]

4) What?

It won't let me use the kick/ban things from the GUI.

I will once you authenticate yourself as an admin. Not long ago you could just have typed '/query' if your admin password was empty but recently this got changed so empty passwords are no longer allowed. Thus you will have to pass your server a config file. E.g.

Code: Select all

$ echo passwd=secret > wesnothd.cfg && ./wesnothd -c wesnothd.cfg  &

Now when you log in to your server you can type '/query secret' to authenticate yourself. After this the moderation GUI should be available.
See also http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/ServerAdministration.

5) As far as I know ghosts should be killed by the server automatically. Anyways, if you run your own server you can just kick ghosts and on the official server ghosts will be automatically kicked if you log in with a registered nick.

It doesn't, and when I run my own server I can't kick if this happens because the admin is already there.

I am not quite sure why you are trying to say? So you have already figured out how to give yourself admin access but only for one particular user?
Anyways, you can also administrate a server without loggin in with a client (c&p from the wesnothd man page):

Code: Select all

       fifo_path
              The  path to the fifo you can echo server commands into (same as
              /query ... from wesnoth).  If not specified defaults to the com\u2010
              pile-time    specified   path   (default:   /var/run/socket/wes\u2010
              nothd/socket).

[DarkDespair5]

That clears up a lot of things. I thought it was possible to configure a server directly from the GUI without editing cfg files.